Monitoring the activities of moving objects is important for detecting safety, security and compliance irregularities. For example, in the maritime industry, crew members, vessels (e.g., container ships, tankers, passenger ships, bulk carriers, cargo ships, etc.) and commodities worth billions of dollars are constantly on the move. Various threats and illegal activities, such as terrorism, piracy, oil smuggling, drugs and human trafficking, counterfeiting, poaching, illegal fishing and environmental hazards can take place in port waters and can affect regular day-to-day port operations, resulting in human and financial losses. These suspicious activities around moving objects (e.g., maritime vessels) must be detected and reported in real time as soon as possible.
Since maritime safety and security is of great concern to many stakeholders, such as port authorities, shipping, insurance and logistics companies, freight forwarders, the International Maritime Organization's International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea requires an automatic identification system (AIS) to be fitted aboard international voyaging ships with gross tonnage (GT) of 300 or more tons, and all passenger ships regardless of their size. The AIS is an automatic tracking system that is used to identify and locate vessels by electronically exchanging data with other nearby vessels and AIS base stations. AIS-equipped vessels can be tracked by AIS base stations located along coast lines or, when out of range of terrestrial networks, through satellites fitted with special AIS receivers.
However, due to the enormous volume of traded commodities, large number and size of maritime vessels and complexity of maritime operations, tracking and monitoring the activities of maritime vessels is not a trivial task. Currently, there does not appear to be a complex event processing system that can automatically and efficiently manage the large streams of AIS and other sensor data for maritime safety and security. The lack of a readily available system that can automatically detect maritime anomalies (or complex events) based on ships' navigational behavior can lead to a loss of revenue and reputation, inefficiency of port operations, increase in cost of maritime transportation, non-compliance of regulations and laws, and so forth.
Thus, a need exists for systems, methods, and apparatuses to address the shortfalls of current technology, and to provide other new and innovative solutions.